


A Dream of Distant Lands

by pocketbookangel



Category: xxxHoLic
Genre: Angst, Eventual Happy Ending, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-17
Updated: 2014-09-17
Packaged: 2018-02-17 18:18:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,390
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2318843
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pocketbookangel/pseuds/pocketbookangel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Death is the beginning of a new journey for Doumeki Shizuka.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Dream of Distant Lands

Doumeki Shizuka knows he is dying. He knows this because of the kindness in the young doctor when he tells him not to worry and refuses to give the disease a name.

His son visits, stern and silent, and Doumeki wants to apologize for whatever unhappiness that silence hides. He wants to explain how the burden was meant to be his alone, but he looks at his son and they are both old men.

His grandsons visit. Doumeki wants to give them advice, but his own marriage was part of a different time and involved different obligations. The oldest grandson, pale and worried, arrives with a nervous fiancée. She fusses with her jewelry, adjusts her bracelets, and touches the pendant he recognizes as something his wife used to wear. I’m happy for you, he tells them. Be happy.

The younger of his two grandsons sulks, then leaves the room in search of a soda or juice or coffee or something and doesn’t come back. Doumeki understands the terrible shyness that keeps the young man away. He tries to remember how he felt, how he behaved during his own grandfather’s last illness, but like so many of his memories, it has faded into conflicting images of what he wanted and what was real. There is no one now alive who remembers my grandfather, he thinks, then corrects himself. There is no one who remembers my grandfather alive, but there is someone who remembers him. There is someone who remembers Haruka, someone who remembers Kohane, and maybe he will remember me. 

Doumeki closes his eyes.

“This is the land of the dead,” a dry, whisper informs him. Doumeki is surrounded by a grey, cold landscape, populated silvery wraiths tied to the earth. “You don’t belong here,” the voice adds, the soft rustle of manuscript pages. There were books containing spells that might have saved him, one of Doumeki’s earliest failures.

“Where’s my wife?”

“I don’t know.”

“You said this is the land of the dead.” Nothing in the landscape moves. The grey figures moan into the stillness.

“This is not where the dead stay.” It sounds more fragile than before. “This is where they wait to forget.”

Doumeki stands up. He feels blood pumping noisily through his body, in fact, he feels more alive than he has in years.

“Where will you go, Doumeki Shizuka?”

“Home.”

“You’re not the one he’s waiting to meet.”

“That doesn’t matter.”

Doumeki hears a disappointed sigh, and knows he is alone. He walks, keeping the grey, cold sun behind him, until he reaches the ocean.

Instead of a cool marine breeze, dust fills the air, and carries with it the papery smell he associates with his grandfather’s books. Dark waves gently slide over the pebbled shore.

“Is it what you expected?”

Doumeki turns to face a small, fair-haired girl holding a handful of pebbles in her fists. She looks around ten years old, but Doumeki’s years at the shop had taught him not to make any assumptions regarding age. “No,” he says.

“Humans are born not just to die, but to be forgotten. Since you’ve made it this far, someone must be holding on to your memory. Maybe it’s that woman.”

He thinks of his wife, and of the sadness in her eyes.

“Not that one, not your wife,” the child giggled. “The other one. Oh, such an unlucky day for you, the day you caught the eye of the Dimension Witch. She calls it fate, all the while knowing there are so many paths, so many futures, and nothing is inevitable.”

“I see.”

“There is a you who never walked this road, and there is a me who was never condemned to this beach. There is a you who saves him, and another who let him fade into a dream, to become a few lines on a torn page.” The girl expects a reaction from Doumeki, but he isn’t like the others.

“When you say condemned…”

“I can’t leave until I’ve counted every stone on this beach.” She opens her hand and displays a black stone the size of a chess piece. “This is 2,000,061.”

Doumeki looks at the little girl. She is small and tired and the beach stretches around them. “I’ll help,” he says. He counts the stones from left to right, moving from the ocean to the shore and back again. The sun never sets, but he does feel time pass, feels it move forward with every stone he counts. Translucent blue, dark purple, white, glassy grey, black.

“You know,” he hears the girl say as he drops 50,078,663 and 50,078,664, “he’s not waiting for you to come back.”

Doumeki doesn’t answer. It’s too difficult to count and talk, and she doesn’t mention it again.

“Thank you,” the girl holds out her closed fists.   “Choose one.”

Doumeki nods at her right hand and she opens it to display a tiny diamond.

“If you swallow it, you can travel under the waves. Once again, thank you, Doumeki Shizuka.”

The girl bows, then walks away. Doumeki watches her until she becomes a small dot in the distance, smaller than the stones they counted, smaller than the diamond in his hand.

Waves crash over his head and salt water fills his lungs. How many times can someone die? Sickly green sunlight fades as he wades deeper into the sublittoral waters. Cities rise and fall, their ruins lie under the waters and become the haunts of demons. Strange colours light the path before him; curious eyes watch him as he passes through their kingdoms. He hears voices, dead languages spoken by living tongues.

There was another dark night where they stood, hands almost touching, magic suspended between them, illuminating the world of the spirits on parade. Light flares in front of him, memory made corporal, and he’s no longer alone. A hand, almost touching his, rests on the lamp. For one moment he allows himself to hope.

It’s not him. It’s a woman, but not completely a woman. Familiar dark hair swirls around an inhuman face, even transformed into this aquatic creature, he recognizes the teasing smile and playful eyes. She sings to Doumeki, a song about a well at the heart of the world where a single penny can buy a wish. The song is sweet and joyful, but he grows angry as he watches her dance through the water.

“What are you doing here? He’s waiting for you,” he says.

The mermaid’s gills flutter as she sighs. “I’m sorry, my dear, but you can only make wishes for yourself.” Her cold fingers stroke Doumeki’s forehead.

“Why are you doing this to him?”

“Shizuka, darling. Do you think we live in a world where wishes come true so easily?”

He’s wrong. He’s never seen those eyes before, never seen the wide mouth with its rows of serrated teeth. She sings about a goldfish swimming under the ice of a frozen pond, happy in the only world it knows, so much happier than a young man with infinite universes before him.

He wants to tell her that he doesn’t know how to make a wish, how to desire something besides the safety and happiness of the one he loves.

 

\--

 

“What did he wish for?” Watanuki asked, not that he cared about the end of the story. He’d lost track somewhere around the ghost rocks or whatever they were.

Doumeki raised one eyebrow slightly. “What does anyone wish for? More wishes.”

“That’s cheating!” Watanuki was outraged on behalf of the wish-granting mermaid.

“Maybe he wished for something else. Sometimes the story has a different ending.”

“If I had a wish,” Watanuki paused. The school was starting to wake up from its lunchtime indolence. Students were returning to their classrooms and the prettiest girl in school waved at him from a second floor window. “I’d be a knight and Himawari a princess.”

“No, you wouldn’t.”

The sudden anger in Doumeki’s voice confused Watanuki, but as they became closer, he’d become used to the occasional strange opinion. Maybe Doumeki didn’t want to hear about Sir Watanuki and Princess Himawari.

“You don’t have to be jealous,” Watanuki said. He reached for Doumeki’s hand. Only a fool would want to live in a world of wishes and magic when he could live in this one.


End file.
